The Living Better With Less Group had the honour of a tour of his garden this weekend and one and a half hours flew by as he spoke to us passionately about soil health, nutrient balance, seed dilemmas for small growers and plant spacing for optimum yields.
Steve lives in suburbia on a large block and grows all the food for his family all year round.
Everything lush, healthy and disease resisting. He grows for food and also extra for seed. Growing from saved seeds saves $$$ and you can be assured of genetic material suited for your area, climate and vigorous.
He spoke about his huge line of asparagus that he keeps contained width-wise between the parallel wires. This limits the sprawl and also makes weeding and access easier. He tells us that over a few years he selectively culled all the female crowns and kept only male plants a) because they produce larger spears rather than putting their vigour into seed production and b) by culling the females he avoids the prolific seed drop and thus delays over-crowding for years.
Another shot of his garden and a climbing frame for peas and beans. In the very first photo, Steve and I are standing in front of his healthy kiwi fruit vines covered in flowers. Down the western side he has espaliered fruit trees and berry bushes. A netted tunnel of raspberries is heavily cropping and you can just about hear the plants singing.
Steve is 73 and very fit and looks at least 10 years younger than his age. What struck me especially was the way he is still learning and still experimenting with growing. Further proof that you never stop learning. Reluctantly we thanked him and departed and I have to tell you the experience has been very profound for me. My mind has been in a whirl, thinking of all we spoke about, trying to catch hold of it and not let a snippet of information be missed.
Afterwards we enjoyed a bountiful shared lunch at a fellow members beautiful mud brick built house by the Tamar river. Wonderful times and memories to treasure.
If you have the opportunity, Steve's books are well worth the investment. This is the copy I covet. I wish all of you could have joined us and benefited from his knowledge and passion.
At our Living Better With Less group meet up last Thursday night we had an introduction to cheese making from the incredibly organised and engaging Neville who timed this visit with us to coincide with his formal class teaching of the same this week. Not only did we have a great informative discussion but we also got some student samples to try for inspiration.
Neville explained in a very easy manner, the chemistry involved in cheese making, the properties of milk and the characteristics of altered proteins. We discussed common terms that you commonly hear in the cheese world like, rennet, curds, whey and he stepped us through the two characteristics of soft cheese and hard cheese and their properties.
It's a big subject and we would like to thank Neville for giving us a great snapshot of the basics, the pitfalls, joys and realities of this hobby.
We had lots of books to pour over and we discussed the merits of kits. Though there are a couple of home brew shops in town with basics, most supplies are thoroughly catered for on line.
Afterwards we had some wonderful cheese tastings with a cuppa
Here are the cheeses made by the students.
The golden yellow one is a mozzarella cheese infused with saffron.
The other is a home made curd cheese called Paneer which has had seeded mustard added.
If you would like to step further into the wonderful world of cheese making I would suggest you start here at
we have a brand new facebook page here so you can follow along woth our activities and events and keep up to date with meet up reminders. Living Better With Less is open to all interested and like minded people and is a non-profit informal group meeting on the last Thursday of each month except December and is totally free however we do donate a gold coin to cover tea/coffee/power etc at the Urban Farming Seed Studio where we made possible by the kind sharing of Bridget and Peter. We meet at 3 Charles St south in Launceston Tas. and hope to see you one day.
Later in October on the 17th
we will join Urban Farming Fiesta in Yorktown Square. We'll have a stall showing examples of our various industries and endeavours and be on hand for some chatting. More details closer to the date and may I also recommend the
Also coming up in November we have been kindly invited to tour Steve Solomon's garden which I am very excited about. Steve is a bit of a growing cold climate vegetable guru here in Tasmania and has written several books. His "Growing Vegetables South of Australia" is particularly popular here. Can't wait for that and again...you guessed it...more details closer to the date. But it will be in November and we will also take the opportunity to have a little end of year break up afternoon tea party too.
This took literally a minute to make, cost next to nothing and you can say goodbye to millions of toothpaste tubes in land fill.
Winner!
The exercise also sparked debate about fluoride and discussions about essential oils, bulk suppliers locally and on-line....
We moved on to sunscreen and discussed the properties of zinc oxide and titanium oxide and nano particles and micronisation and the price disparity between pharmacies and on line soap suppliers.
Again this was a super simple measure, melt, whip and pour process.
Everyone was grinning from ear to ear with their success and we can't thank you enough Lisa for all your preparation, ingredient organisation, recipe sheets and all the great mini equipment we got to play with.
The girls from Nourishing My Family gave a great talk last Monday and if you live locally they'll be doing it again. Details at the bottom of the post.
It was all about Kombucha, Milk Kefir and Water Kefir.
Above is the kombucha which is a fermentation of sweetened black tea by a Symbiotic Colony Of Bacteria and Yeast, commonly called SCOBY, which is the rubbery mass in the right photo. The scoby floats on the tea and in about 10 days it has produced a lightly effervescent drink. There is much see-sawing about the scientifically proved evidence of health benefits but it has been a practice in many countries for decades with very strong anecdotal evidence. The resulting drink contains probiotics, multiple species of yeasts and bacteria and acetic acid, lactic acid and glucuronic acid. If your liver is overloaded and under stress the additional glucuronic acid binds with toxins allowing them to be excreted.
We taste tested kombucha that had been flavoured by different teas. We tried a vanilla and rose kombucha that was really quite remarkable in taste and would be a wonderful cool beverage to serve people. Other flavours include, peach, blackcurrant, green tea and more.
Like anything produced for consumption there are protocols to follow but the process is very simple. Do some research and maybe it could be for you. The scoby produces "babies" readily so if you put the word out you are bound to be able to obtain one for free and be sure to get a cup of the existing tea to go with it to. If mould occurs, throw the whole batch and scoby away and start again.
We also taste tested milk kefir and water kefir, a probiotic drink made from a fermentation using starter "grains" (because they look lumpy like grains) of yeasts and bacteria. Again, whether you use cows milk, coconut milk, water etc, the result is a slightly effervescent tangy drink. I really love the milk kefir straight but many people enjoy it in smoothies. There are a wide range of health benefits and again, the scoby grains multiply readily and if you ask around somebody will have some to give away. If you find yourself swamped, just refrigerate and put it into a state of retardation till you are ready to resume fermenting. Your chooks will LOVE any spare probiotic drink or scoby as well and it is good for them too.
It's a big subject so get out there and do some reading. There are plenty of sources on the net and I also recommend reading "Nourishing Traditions" by Sally Fallon. For those lucky enough to be in the Launceston area, the girls are coming to do a FREE talk and taste at the next
Living Better With Less
Thurs 28th August
3 Charles St south (parking in Howick St)
(If you could let me know you are coming for numbers that would be great)
There will be grains to give away, please bring a jar with a lid and there may also be kombucha scoby.
There were however some other questions and answers that came out of the session that I thought would be helpful to list here.
Our recipe on the night was calendula, rose hip, plantain and chamomile infused oil.
It's a good idea to make a diary note when making something like a salve or any kind of preserve because you can go back and reference quantities, date, personal notes on effectiveness of infusion and ingredient preferences.
You can use fresh or dried herbs and plant material. If using fresh make sure they are free from dew or moisture before placing in the oil to avoid your batch going mouldy.
We advised researching the efficacies of plants before using them and making your salve with conscious intent. For instance; comfrey is an amazing fast healer BUT you don't want to use it in cases of open wounds as it can heal SO quickly that it may heal infection within the wound and even may hamper the edges of a wound from effectively building a knitted skin repair by healing the edges rather than a knitted closed wound. It can also be liver toxic in large quantities and is not recommended for small children so we would not recommend it in a nappy cream for instance. By all means though, a comfrey salve for strained gardeners' backs or sprained ankles is marvellous and particularly helpful on broken bones. So choose your purpose and then pick your plants to tailor make your salve to suit. For another example; you could add essential oils of eucalyptus, cedar, mint for a vaporising chest rub for colds and congestion.
A word on essential oils - go easy! Just because something is natural doesn't make it safe for everyone, for instance lavender is one of the most common sensitivities. The commercial world has convinced us that everything has to "smell nice" but not everything has to be perfumed. Give your nose a break. When you ditch a lot of the chemicals and scented products from your life you will find your nose has re-adjusted and become sensitive to nuances again. Only add essential oils for a specific purpose that meets your intent.
Rosehips contain very fine fibrous irritating "hairs". They can be infused whole but I believe it is more effective to chop them. By hand this is a laborious job and I suggest a closed lidded food processor. Adding oil will also keep fibres contained so they don't become airborne.
The beeswax will dissolve evenly and quickly into the oil at a low temperature if it is grated. You can source small pelleted beeswax from craft suppliers but I prefer to buy from local honey makers so it is usually in a chunk or a bar and needs to be grated. This is a bit laborious too and I've made just about all the mistakes for you. If you try chopping/grating in a food processor, the spinning blades create enough heat to melt the wax slightly so after a couple of seconds you have a small amount grated and a quantity stuck to the blades stopping them from any further cutting/grating. You could use your microplane but it will blunt the blades quite quickly. I find a grater used for cheese, carrots etc is the best method. Another in the group said she melts her beeswax and pours it into the oil which you would also need to have warmed so the two will mix and blend. Six of one and half a dozen as far as washing up mess goes so I may try the melt and mix method next time as I do make in a quantities that require grating 100g plus.
Speaking of washing up. A good rubber/silicon spatula will ensure you get the sides of pots etc really scraped down cleanly and then I advise wiping out the warm pot with a piece of paper towel to remove extra residue before washing up.
If you think of other questions let me know and I will edit and add. If you have anything other experiences you would like to share please add them in the comments below. Please also feel free to add a url in your comment if you would like to direct people to a relevant post you have made about slave making as shared experiences are learned experiences. (Note; any advertising and non-relevant material will be deleted)
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As always, none of my posts are intended as medical advice but merely a description of what we discussed and did. If you have any medical concerns you should always defer to your naturopath or doctor for their advice.
Our Living Better With Less group met up last Thursday and our guest speaker had a BIG subject
Composting.
She gave a superlative talk to our group, keeping jargon to a minimum and dispelling the mysterious, she proposed simple no frills ways with waste for every home.
She talked about hot composting, cold composting, worm farming and bokashi.
Dianne has taken on an exciting project that I'd like to share with locals and maybe others could start in their communities too. About four months ago Dianne found two cafes wanting to commit to saving their food waste for collection. A team of people are rostered to pick up the buckets of scrap and they either use them to feed chickens or make compost or feed worm farms. Both of the cafes are vegetarian and have a lot of organic waste matter. This is a win/win for the cafes and for the people using the waste and it's FREE!
"Fresh"
There are more cafes wanting to come on board but they need more people to do collection. What do you think? Are there any locals who can help?
Are you inspired to do this in your town?
Has your community garden or school garden thought about this resource in your area?
"Garden of Vegan"
The goal is to eventually find a central location for mass scale composting and then making the rich humus available for all gardeners. Ideally council co-operation would be key and it could also be a site where they dump their collected leaf litter, grass clippings and tree mulch. The group is dreaming of owning a gobbler that turns waste into compost in 24hr turn around!!!
If you are interested in knowing more about the project or about worm farming or bokashi methods check out the face book page here Worm Wranglers
Thanks Dianne for an awesome talk.
Next month we meet up 26th June
at 3 Charles St south, Launceston
7-9pm
We will be looking at simple herbals around the home and step by step making a healing salve.
We had a wonderful warm, sharing night at our last Living Better With Less meet up last Thursday.
Our new venue provided by Bridgette Watts and her partner was a huge success and I can see some great sessions to come. A small kitchenette will mean that we can do some hands on preserving and soap making in the months to come.
TheUrban Farm Tas group also had crates of apples and pears that they had picked that day surplus to farm requirements and Cindy brought along her Worcestershire sauce for a taste test that is ideally made with foraged apples - BONUS!
Again the sauce was a real hit so here is the recipe again....
(Extracted from SJ blog 01.10.13)
"I was extremely impressed with the taste and the simplicity of the recipe.
Cindy believes the secret of this sauce lies in the apple and she used foraged apples from the side of the road which are typically less sweet than the commercially grown ones.
Here is the recipe....
It was from a CWA book and credit goes to Maty Coleman Rosebud Branch VIC.
Worcester Sauce
1kg of apples
1/4 clove garlic
1 cup salt
4 1/2 Lt of vinegar
100g ground allspice
100g peppercorns
100g whole ginger
2 fresh red chillies
1 1/2 cups treacle
Cut up the apples and garlic coarsely. Cover with water and boil to a pulp, then strain through a colander into a large pan.
Gradually add the vinegar to the strained liquid. Add all the other ingredients except the treacle and boil for 2 1/2 hours.
Add the treacle and boil for another 30 minutes.
Strain and bottle. Store in a cool dark place. Keeps well.
Makes about 2 cups."
The Urban Farming Tas group also brought along their seed box (isn't it magnificent?) of free seed to share. This is just the autumn/winter planting selection! They are a great not for profit food sovereignty group who encourage, share, feed, garden and distribute food and seed.
They will be holding a share market at Bracknell Tasmania next Sunday to celebrate International Permaculture Day. You can find the detailshere. Among the planned activities will be soap making, basket weaving, worm farming and seed sharing.
We also taste tested green bean pickles at our last Living Better meet up - I tell you there is not many meetings when we don't seem to be passing around some preserve, cordial or bread!
This is yet another type of pickle and a great way other than freezing or drying to preserve green beans.
This is Cindy's mother's recipe!
For every kilo of fresh green beans (chopped) use the following
3 cups of vinegar
4 large onions chopped
3 cups of sugar
1 tabs salt
3 tabs curry powder
1 tabs each of turmeric, cumin and mustard powder
4 tabs cornflour
6 fresh chillies (or to taste)
Par boil the beans and drain
Mix dry ingredients into a paste with a little of the vinegar
Add sugar to the vinegar and dissolve
In a saucepan mix the paste, vinegar and beans, chillies and onion together.
Bring to a boil and cook for 5mins
Bottle hot into warm sterilised jars.
Green bean pickles recipes can usually be found in every family and are simple to make but boy are they delicious. Excellent with cheese sandwiches and cold meat salads. They never last long in our house.
Next Living Better With Less meeting is the 27th February 2014.
The other night at our Living Better With Less group, we also talked about pickling as another method of vegetable preservation that doesn't rely on the freezer. It does rely on the refrigerator for storage though. If you are harvesting from your yard generally you'll find less supermarket trips ergo more fridge room anyway. The group did some taste test sampling of pickled daikon and there were mixed reactions.
This method is of Asian influence and after reading several recipes I used "Vietnamese Pickled Carrot and Daikon"(without the carrot as ours isn't ready yet). I cut the daikon using a mandolin to shred it finely and it is jarred with sugar, salt and vinegar with some Sichuan pepper in my version. These are stored in the fridge and are ready to eat in three days but last for about three weeks. This produces a very mild palatable pickle and takes a lot of the pungency from the daikon. It would be great with salads, added to rice paper wraps or alongside cold roast meats. I made two tall jars and I'm pretty confident these will be certainly gone in a few weeks.
The other method we taste tested was the natural ferment version. This is made in a very similar way to the pickled cucumbers and pickled beetroot. Once again I reached for my all time favourite book "Preserving" by Oded Schwartz. His version calls for beetroot and radish but again...timing, my beetroot is not in glut enough yet!
Be warned! During the first couple of days I kept trying to find what had died and was causing the foul smell in my kitchen, radish and cabbages too can be a bit like that. After a couple of days as the fermentation got under way it started to "burp" a garlicky smell in the kitchen. After a couple of weeks the crunchy, salty rounds are ready and the jars are lidded and the lids popped on and they are stored in the fridge. These will store for about 3-6 months and will be a great source of nutrient and something different to tempt our palettes in winter. They are much more pungent than the Asian pickled version and I like to snack on them on their own and they would be an interesting addition to a cheese board or ploughman's lunch.
If you are growing cucumbers and beetroot this summer I definitely urge you to check out the post links above. I could not stop myself eating the pickled beetroot and it didn't last long at all. I am looking forward to making some more again this year.
Our Living Better With Less group met up again last week and it was good to see everyone after our Christmas break. Unfortunately the Workers Club has let us down yet again so we are on the hunt for a new venue. I will post the new details soon.
The Living Better With Less group is a free interest group for people wanting to live a better life with less money, chemicals and "stuff". We focus on gardening, housekeeping, foraging, preserving and net work together for a simpler but richer life. We meet on the last Thursday of every month except December from 7-9pm.
We focus on seasonal activities and right now in Tasmania, apricots are ripening right now.
If you are able to get hold of some nice firm just ripe apricots they are great for bottling using a water bath method but if they have turned the corner and started to become soft then you might like to consider stewing and then freezing or blending to a thick liquid and dehydrating to a fruit leather.
Fruit leathers can be done in your dehydrator on the solid sheets or you can cut baking paper to fit the trays and this works well too. After a few hours when the leather has become a sticky firm sheet it can be rolled in baking paper and stored in a cool cupboard for lunch boxes and snacks.
We also talked about drying apricot halves in a dehydrator. This can take many hours up to one or two days depending on the size of the fruit. I rotate my shelves from bottom to top to try to get even drying and inspect from time to time removing any ready fruit.
It's important to note that home dried fruit in this way is sulphur free and therefore looks different to the commercially prepared ones. Instead of glowing orange orbs, they are more like burnt umber and have some darkened spots where the concentrated fruit sugars have cooked.
After passing around taste tests they were found to be every bit as delicious.
I have become a big fan of dehydrating. It reduces the size of your crop significantly allowing you to fit kilos and kilos into just a couple of jars. You can opt to solar dry but I find the electric one is very quick and draws very little energy and maintains a lot of colour, especially in herbs. It is a great alternative to freezing where space is often at a premium. I believe in spreading food storage over a number of methods; if anything were to happen to your power supply at least you would not lose all your stores.
And of course, having dried apricots on hand is a must for my most asked for recipe
One thing is for sure, there is no time to lose when you get your hands on a case of apricots from the market or a couple of buckets from a friend, apricots will ripen in a matter of a day or two so be prepared to roll up your sleeves and get them saved for some treats in the winter months to come.
It's been another cracker of a year; my fourth year of blogging and I'm gratified to still have many old faces turning up in the comments and thrilled every time someone new joins our conversations too.
The tutorial for the waffle crochet stitch still draws a huge crowd daily but aside from the usual popular posts of all time, readers were most interested in seasonal food, herbs and organic growing.
about organic backyard growing and also eliciting the most comments.
The Living Better Group met together every month for another year learning about growing, foraging, preserving, brewing, baking and many other home crafts.
Next year I anticipate our lives will shift again as we move into the role of grand parents.
I do hope there will be another year of blogging and I hope you will be with me through the next year. Thank you for your kindness and interest throughout the last twelve months.
Last Thursday we had another exciting, informative and abundant meet up of the "Living Better With Less" group. Here is what you missed....
One of our group is from Zimbabwe and comes from a family who loved to cook. Her father taught her how to make biltong, also known in other areas as beef jerky and is a way of preserving meat using dehydration and salt. Traditionally it is dried in a biltong box but you can also do this in an electric dehydrator.
Not only did we get a taste test and a recipe sheet but everyone also went home with a generous scoop of the spice mix and a take home piece of biltong. Thanks Cindy for your generous sharing and family secret recipe.
Spice Mix
150g Coriander seeds
100g ground coriander
50g milled black pepper
1 tabs black pepper powder
1/4 teas ground cloves
25g ground nutmeg
2 oxo/bullion stock cubes
This amount of spice mix is enough to do about 10kg meat which when dry will yield about 5kg of biltong.
10kg of silverside/rump (or any cheap cut of meat trimmed)
1 cup salt
1-1 1/2 cups of malt vinegar
Method
Trim all excess fat off the meat
Slice the meat thickly across the grain (so the slivers have short fibres)
Slice these into long strips
Place the strips into a non-metallic dish or bowl in layers sprinkling the spice mix, salt and vinegar between each layer.
Mix together until well combined and all the meat is covered in the mixture
Leave for at least 12-24 hours in the fridge turning every so often
Place in the dehydrator or drying box. It will take 12-48hrs in the dehydrator and 3-4 days in a biltong cupboard.
Traditionally biltong is made from the African game meats like springbok, wildebeest, antelope etc by the Boers during the Boer War. Here in Tasmania venison and wallaby are readily available and this method would be especially good for these meats too.
Cindy also brought in the above book for us to peruse too. It is called "Odd Bits" by Jennifer McLagan and has information and recipes for using other parts of the animals besides the traditional muscle cuts. It is a beautiful book and quite comprehensive, if I had a criticism it would only be that I would have loved more photos but it is a sizeable book as is. Beautifully produced and recommended.
We also extended our talks on bread and sour doughs with some quick cheater/simple starters. Thsi book is called "The Universal Loaf" by Tamara Milstein
This book "World Breads" by Paul Gayler totally stole my heart though with it's simple format that methodically covered all the different types of bread from many cultures.
Here is a snap of the contents page which belies the breadth and depth of range the book covers and the photography is superb and beguiling.
Recently this order arrived at my house and this book had everyone just a little excited. It is a simple sharing of ideas and I say this with absolute respect, a backyarder of a book with naive drawings and short anecdotes.
For instance, how to make simple seed packets....
Strawberry growing for common gardens (not an imitation of commercial mono-cropping farms)
Keeping alive the art of home made fertilisers and soil conditions rather than chemical band-aids.
The text is conversational and full of common sense and old fashioned labour saving devices. The author, Herrick Kimball, has a blog called "The Deliberate Agrarian" and you can get to know him better here.
He has coined the phrase "Whizbang" for his many inventions and this segues nicely to the next book that got everyone excited....also by Herrick....
And if this book doesn't make your toes tingle then you have obviously never plucked a quantity of chickens before. The last bird processing Craig and I did was seven between us and we were well and truly over it simply because the plucking is such a time taker. Brad who also attends our group admitted that he more often than not just skins his fowls simply because of the time it takes. Here is a video of the machine in action and you have got to see this...
So after pouring over books and learning about meat drying we talked about artichoke recipes and seasonal plantings. We were lucky to have David with us again from Inspiration Seeds
He had a packet of free seeds for everyone and Asian Greens were certainly flavour of the month.
Next month we will have as our guest Lee from Killiecrankie Farm Nursery and Christmas Tree Farm and ahead of her visit she sent along a taster of the lesser known seedlings that you won't find in the chain store nurseries. We had punnets of senposai, kai lan, khol rabi and a type of perpetual spinach.
Martin also had seedlings to give away that he had started. He had the lovely "Santa" tomatoes that David had brought along for us to taste test at the end of last summer. They are a perfectly round tomato the size of about a large walnut and they have that old fashioned tomatoey-tomato flavour.
Brad and Elisha brought in excess lemons which also added to the take home piles.
Katherine had done some bread recipes out for us also so with our spice mix, biltong, seedlings, seeds and lemons......
It was a very exciting, informative and abundant meeting indeed.
It's free and we do it on the last Thursday of every month except December from 7-9 upstairs at the Launceston Workers Club and everyone is welcome.
On the 28th of November as I said we will welcome the knowledge of Lee from Killiecrankie Farm as she takes us on the next step of herbs beyond the parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme....
January is not booked yet but in February we have a naturopath Inge Kaiser coming along to talk about alternative therapies and home remedies.
Are you still with me? It was a long post and I wish you could have been with us but I hope this was the next best thing for you.
